Pictures of all black German Shepherds

Harvard’s inaugural Black in Design Conference, organized by the African American Student Union at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, seeks to simultaneously recognize the contributions of African Descendants to the design fields and to broaden our definition of what it means to be a designer. We believe that initial steps towards addressing social injustice through design are to reclaim the histories of underrepresented groups in design pedagogy and to implicate designers as having a role in repairing our broken built environment.

Dedicated to the pursuit of just and equitable spaces across all scales, this conference will broach conversations in increasing orders of magnitude: the building, the neighborhood, the city, the region, and the globe. We hope that this conference will serve to ingrain compassion for human beings into the ethos of design more broadly, as well as to instill a sense of responsibility within those who pass through the doors of the GSD.